Carol M. Highsmith · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

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Eastern State Penitentiary

added28 August 20261971

A Philadelphia prison that pioneered total solitary confinement in the 19th century. Closed in 1971 and left in ruins, its vaulted cellblocks are counted among the most reputedly haunted places in the United States.

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2027 Fairmount Avenue

39.96830, -75.17250

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The Philadelphia Experiment

The story runs that on 28 October 1943, at the navy yard in Philadelphia, the destroyer escort Eldridge became invisible, jumped instantly to Norfolk and came back with sailors fused into the bulkheads. All of it goes back to one man: Carl Allen, writing as Carlos Allende, who in 1955–56 covered a copy of the astronomer Morris Jessup's book in marginal notes and sent it to the Navy. The Eldridge's deck log puts the ship off New York and in the Bahamas on those dates; she was never in Philadelphia. In 1969 Allen told investigators that he had invented the annotations. The Office of Naval Research has answered enquiries with a standard fact sheet ever since.

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Philadelphia and the Kangaroo with Bronze Wings

For a week in January 1909 southern New Jersey and Philadelphia lived in a panic: thousands reported tracks in the snow and a flying creature, schools closed, factories sent workers home. In the middle of it Norman Jefferies, publicity agent for Philadelphia's Arcade Museum, announced that the Jersey Devil had been captured. In the case sat a kangaroo he had bought, with bronze wings fastened to its back, and a man poking the cage to keep it moving. Jefferies admitted it himself years later — along with the fact that some of that week's eyewitness reports had also been his work.

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Philadelphia and the Kangaroo with Bronze Wings

2 km away

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The Philadelphia Experiment

9 km away

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The Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil

A million and a half acres of pine on sand, where a three-hundred-year-old legend of Mother Leeds's thirteenth child persists. In 1735, the story goes, she said in temper that the child could be the devil — and the newborn turned into a winged thing with hooves and a horse's head, went up the chimney, and has been here since. In January 1909 it was reported across the state for a solid week; schools closed, and tracks were found in the snow on rooftops.

43 km away

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The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (officially the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station, or ChNPP) is a decommissioned nuclear energy facility located in the Vyshhorod Raion of Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, along the Pripyat River and a man-made cooling reservoir, roughly 3 kilometers southeast of the abandoned city of Pripyat and 18 kilometers northwest of Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, the site suffered the most catastrophic reactor breach in nuclear history (Level 7, the maximum on the INES scale), which destroyed Reactor Unit 4. Today, ChNPP is a specialized decommissioning site enclosed by the monumental New Safe Confinement arch structure.

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